Thomas Paine

First published Thu Jul 18, 2013

Thomas Paine was a pamphleteer, controversialist and international
revolutionary. His Common Sense (1776) was a central text
behind the call for American independence from Britain; his Rights
of Man (1791-2) was the most widely read pamphlet in the movement
for reform in Britain in the 1790s and for the opening decades of the
nineteenth century; he was active in the French Revolution and was a
member of the French National Convention between 1792 and 1795; he is
seen by many as a key figure in the emergence of claims for the
state's responsibilities for welfare and educational provision, and
his Age of Reason provided a popular deist text that remained
influential throughout the 19th century. In his own
lifetime, and subsequently, he has been extensively vilified and often
dismissed. Yet many of his ideas still command wide interest and
enthusiasm in readers throughout the world.

Thomas Paine was born on January 29, 1737 to a family of moderate
means in Norfolk, England. His father was a Quaker and his mother an
Anglican, and it is likely Paine was baptized into the Anglican
church. He had some schooling, although his father forbade him to
learn Latin, and at the age of twelve he was withdrawn from school and
apprenticed to his father to learn the craft of staymaking. When he
was in his mid-teens, inspired by the romantic stories of naval life
by one of his teachers, Paine twice ran away from home to sea. The
first time he was intercepted. The second time he enlisted on the
privateer, the King of Prussia. The exact sequence of events
over the subsequent ten to fifteen years is unclear. He lived in
London on and off, but also had periods in Sandwich and in Margate. He
continued periodically to ply his skills as a staymaker; he may have
done some preaching (in the Methodist persuasion); and in 1759 he
married a Mary Lambert, who died the following year in
childbirth. Following his wife's death, he sought his father-in-law's
support to take up a career in the excise service. He first served as
an officer in December 1762, but in August 1765 he was dismissed for
‘stamping’—providing certificates for goods not
inspected. He wrote formally apologising and seeking re-admission to
the service, which was granted. While awaiting a posting he taught
school in London. In 1768 he accepted a posting to Lewes, on the South
Coast of England, and he took up lodgings with a Samuel Ollive, a
local tobacconist. In Lewes he became a member of the debating
society—the Headstrong Club—and he was also reputed as a
skater and player of bowls. Ollive died in July 1769, and Paine took
lodgings elsewhere. But he sustained his links with the family, and in
March 1771 he married the daughter, Elizabeth Ollive (1741-1808) and
established himself as part proprietor of the business. The following
year he went to London to press the claims of the excisemen for higher
pay. Although he returned to Lewes, he was sacked by the excise and
his marriage and business failed. In the final settlement between
Paine and his wife he was awarded £400. He headed to London,
where he secured letters of introduction from Benjamin Franklin, whom
he had encountered on an earlier visit to the capital, and embarked in
April 1774 for the New World. He was carried ashore in Philadelphia in
November 1774 suffering from putrid fever, but he survived.

In Philadelphia Paine developed an acquaintance with Robert Aitkin,
a publisher and bookseller, who employed him to edit
the Pennsylvania Magazine. There remains considerable
disagreement about which pieces in the Magazine were written by Paine,
but it seems clear that he did contribute and that he developed a
reputation among political circles in Philadelphia as a result, at
just the time that tensions with Britain were reaching a crisis
point. In the autumn of 1775, encouraged by Benjamin Rush, Paine began
work on a pamphlet defending the case of American independence. He
discussed his work with Rush, David Rittenhouse, Benjamin Franklin,
and Samuel Adams, but the work was his own (save for the title, for
which Rush claimed responsibility). Common Sense (1776) was
the most widely read pamphlet of the American Revolution. It was a
clarion call for unity, against the corrupt British court, so as to
realize America's providential role in providing an asylum for
liberty. Written in a direct and lively style, it denounced the
decaying despotisms of Europe and pilloried hereditary monarchy as an
absurdity. At a time when many still hoped for reconciliation with
Britain, Common Sense demonstrated to many the inevitability
of separation.

Paine consolidated his reputation as a pamphleteer with his series
of American Crisis letters (1777-83); he also served in a
number of capacities for Congress and the Pennsylvanian
Assembly. Although he had links with the more radical elements of
Pennsylvanian politics, he also committed his energies to a number of
more elite projects—contributing to the establishment of the
Bank of America to help raise money for the war, and working with
Robert Morris to encourage State Legislatures to accept the need for
Federal taxation to support the war. Following the conclusion of the
war he was awarded a farm by the New York assembly, and Congress voted
him a grant of $3,000 for his services.

After the Revolution he dedicated his time to scientific
experiments, designing an iron bridge capable of spanning wide
distances without the use of piers, experimenting with marsh gas with
Washington, and attempting to produce a smokeless candle with
Franklin. In 1787 he took a wooden model of his bridge to Paris, and
subsequently to England where an iron model of 110 feet was forged and
constructed for public display in a field near Paddington in May
1790. He also became increasingly caught up in the initial events of
the French revolution, thanks in part to his involvement with a group
of French intellectuals enabled by Thomas Jefferson (US Minister to
France until late 1789). Paine contemplated writing a history of the
French Revolution but he made slow progress—exacerbated by his
poor French. When Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France appeared in November 1790, he determined to answer it and
turned his materials to that task. The result, Rights of Man
(February/March 1791) coupled a narrative of French events with a
trenchant attack on Burke and the Revolution Settlement of 1688. It
was an immediate success, and brought Paine into the circles of those
seeking to achieve parliamentary reform in Britain. He continued to
visit France and was in Paris in June 1791 in the immediate aftermath
of Louis XVI's flight to Varennes. He collaborated with a small group
(including Nicholas Bonneville and the Marquis de Condorcet) to
produce a republican manifesto that was pasted on the walls of Paris,
to the outrage of most members of the National Assembly. That movement
was firmly repressed at the Massacre of the Champs de Mars in July
1791, by which time Paine was already back in Britain. But the
occasion marks a shift in his thinking—from seeing monarchy as
an inevitable part of the institutional order in the corrupt states of
Europe, to thinking that the American model could be applied more
generally throughout Europe. Where Rights of Man had shown
considerable tolerance for France's limited monarchy, his Rights
of Man: Part the Second (March 1792) was explicitly republican
and he drew extensively on his American experience in sketching the
basic principles of a largely self-regulating commercial society,
coupled with representative government, the rule of law, and a
periodically renewable covenant. The final chapter, influenced by his
friendship with Condorcet and other members of the Comité
de Mendicité, outlined a program for welfare provision for
the poor, aged, disabled and destitute.

The two parts of Rights of Man were quickly combined in
cheap editions (at Paine's insistence) and sold in unprecedented
numbers. Paine's advocacy of natural rights, his attacks on mixed
government, his outspoken republicanism, and his extensive proposals
for schemes of social welfare set him apart from the more common
opposition rhetoric that emphasized the need to protect the integrity
of the mixed constitution to secure English liberties. His success
suggests that he was reaching a popular audience who attached
diminishing weight to these traditions and were struck by his
insistence on their essential equality and their right to challenge
the status quo. In May 1792 a prosecution for sedition was initiated
against him. When the case was heard in November of that year he was
outlawed—but by this time he had returned to France, having been
elected as a member to the National Convention in the summer of
1792.

He arrived in Paris shortly before the September massacres, and it
seems clear that he found it hard to find his feet—being out of
sympathy with the more sanguinary elements in the city. His closest
connections were with Girondin leaders in Paris, who were rapidly to
fall from favour. Moreover, his plea in the National Covention for
clemency for Louis XVI at his trial at the end of 1792, led to his
denunciation by Marat and the enmity of the Jacobin faction. He served
with Condorcet and Sieyes on the Committee to design a republican
constitution, but the extent of his contribution is unclear, and
although Condorcet pressed on with the work, producing a report in the
spring of 1793, it was immediately shelved. Paine led an increasingly
constrained life as the Jacobins assumed ascendancy and his friends
were arrested and executed, fled, or killed themselves. Orders for his
arrest were issued on 27 December 1793. While he was being taken into
custody he passed to his American friend Joel Barlow the manuscript
for the first part of Age of Reason which was published
shortly thereafter. Paine spent eleven months in the Luxembourg (not
unconnected to the studied neglect of his case by the US Minister,
Gouvernor Morris), and seems only narrowly to have escaped the
guillotine. When he left prison, after Robespierre's execution, it was
thanks to the intervention of Morris's successor, James Monroe. On his
release, Paine was in an extremely debilitated state, and Monroe
looked after him in his home. Paine's angry denunciation of
Washington, whom he believed had ignored his pleas for help, and the
publication of subsequent parts of Age of Reason made Monroe
increasingly uncomfortable with his guest and Paine left to live with
the printer Nicholas Bonneville and his family.

Although still a member of the National Convention, Paine had
rarely attended and did not do so after his release. His one
intervention was his Dissertation on First Principles of
Government (1795), a critique of the Constitution of 1795, and a
summary of his own thinking about politics, in which he urged the
Convention to institute universal manhood suffrage. In 1796,
responding to the attempted coup by Babeuf's ‘conspiracy of
equals’, Paine's Agrarian Justice developed further
ideas fist canvassed in the second part of Rights of Man and
set out a principled case for a tax on inheritance so as to provide a
capital grant for all reaching the age of majority, together with an
annual pension for all at fifty, arguing that the earth is common
property to the human race and that everyone is owed compensation for
the private appropriation of it.

Paine finally left France to return to America in 1803, during the
Peace of Amiens, but was vilified on his return for his radicalism,
his deism, and for his embittered critique of Washington. He was
joined in America in 1804 by the wife of Nicholas de Bonneville and
her three sons who lived with him for a period; but this arrangement
broke down and Paine became increasingly ill and isolated. He died in
obscurity in 1809. In 1819, William Cobbett, the Tory turned radical
and critic of Paine turned supporter, had Paine's bones dug up and
returned to England to be buried with honour. They were promptly lost,
thereby ensuring that the man who declared his attachment to be
‘to all the world, not to any particular part’ retained
his universal citizenship.

Paine's reputation has been a source of controversy since his own
lifetime. He was a controversialist—what he wrote invariably
provoked controversy and was intended to do so. As such, one needs a
reasonably capacious understanding of ‘philosophy’ to
count him as a philosopher. He was a pamphleteer, a journalist, a
propagandist, a polemicist. Nonetheless, he also settled on a number
of basic principles that have subsequently become central to much
liberal-democratic culture. Few of these are original to Paine, but
his drawing together of them, and his bringing them before a wide
popular audience, at this key historical moment when the people emerge
as a consistent and increasingly independent force on the political
stages of Europe and North America, has ensured that his works remain
widely read and are seen as of enduring value. That said, a great deal
about his life and about the value and interpretation of his work is
deeply contested and promises to remain so.

In Common Sense Paine opens his account with the contrast
between society and government: ‘Society is produced by our
wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
happiness positively by uniting our affections, the
latter negatively by restraining our vices’ (CW
I, 4). [CW refers to The Complete Writings of
Thomas Paine, P.S. Foner (ed.), 1945.] As with many Paine
claims, this seems simple, intuitive, and attractive. Our interests
unite us, and it is only when we overstep the legitimate bounds of
those interests, or push them to the detriment of others, that we need
constraint. But when we do that, we ought to know better, and as such
Government can appropriately be regarded as constraining our
vices. What is less clear is how far we must assume vice (and thereby
government). ‘Society in every state is a blessing, but
government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its
worst state an intolerable one.’ The opening of Common
Sense can be read as a gloss on Locke's Second Treatise,
without the references to God. Yet Paine claimed never to have read
Locke. He also seems clear in his first major pamphlet that government
‘is a mode rendered necessary by the inability of moral virtue
to govern the world’ (CW I, 6). The issue, then is how extensive
must government be, and what sort of government provides the necessary
benefits, without multiplying the evils. Paine's view is that
‘the more simple anything is, the less liable it is to be
disordered…’ Simple government for Paine is
‘republican government’: he rejects monarchical and mixed
forms of government, in favour of a system in which ‘the liberty
of choosing an House of Commons out of their own body’ is the
key republican moment (CW I, 16).

Paine's attack on monarchy in Common Sense is essentially
an attack on George III. Whereas colonial resentments were originally
directed primarily against the king's ministers and Parliament, Paine
lays the responsibility firmly at the king's door. And he appeals to a
sense among Americans that they have all the resources, and every
claim, to rule themselves without the interference and control of a
body half-way around the world. Subverting paternalist metaphors for
Britain's colonial claims, Paine creates an image of a nation come of
age, ready for freedom from its leading strings, having every
justification for separation from its unnatural parent, and seeking to
stand on its own as a commercial republic, trading in its own
right. It is not America who is behaving unnaturally and ungratefully,
but the ‘royal brute of Great Britain.’ ‘Nature has
deserted the connection, and art cannot supply her place’ (CW I,
23).

Americans do not see the way forward, but it is simple. The
colonies need to be divided into districts, districts should elect
their representatives to Congress, and Congress should choose a
President by ballot from the delegates of each state in turn, with the
first state being chosen by lot. To avoid injustice, three fifths
should be required for a majority. To avoid imposing his views,
however, he suggests that each state nominate two members to a
Continental Congress to frame a charter fixing the details of the
government—‘always remembering that our strength is
continental, not provincial’ (CW I, 29). And in a rare citation
of another's works, Paine appeals to Dragonetti's adage that the aim
should be ‘a mode of government that should combine the greatest
sum of individual happiness with the least national expense’ (CW
I, 29).

For all its success, Common Sense is not without flaws. It
contains a digression on biblical accounts of the origin of monarchy;
its powerful rhetoric leaves unanswered a range of more practical and
theoretical questions, and the argument jumps around
considerably. Later editions added an appendix denouncing the Quakers
for their quietism. But its rhetorical effectiveness cannot be doubted
- which suggests that it intersected powerfully with the concerns and
beliefs that were widespread in colonial America at the point of
rupture. Political theorists might want to press for more details
about who will have the vote; about whether there is an implicit
acceptance of a doctrine of the fall; about the extent to which his
appeals to republics envisage a degree of republican civic virtue;
about whether the argument is based on an account of natural rights;
and so on. But on such issues the pamphlet is either silent or only
barely suggestive. Unlike Locke, this is not a principled
justification for resistance, so much as a concatenation of points
about Americans taking their collective identity and independent
interests seriously and separating from the increasingly arbitrary
rule of Britain. Given these sweeping claims, it is easy to see why so
many commentators have held that Paine was both lacking in
intellectual sophistication and basically held to a consistent set of
principles throughout his work, since it is difficult to demonstrate
that much he says is actively inconsistent with what he later
wrote. Nonetheless, if we take increasing precision in his claims as
evidence of greater attention to issues that he felt he could
confidently sweep past in Common Sense, then a case for a
deepening of his thinking and for a process of change over time can be
made.

While there may be suggestions of rights claims in Common
Sense and in a number of minor texts attributed by some to Paine
but where the authorship is a matter of dispute, it is clear that the
fully fledged account of rights that Paine advances in the first part
of Rights of Man (1791) represents a significant development
in his thinking. It is common to attribute that development to the
foil he found in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in
France (1790), where Burke inveighs against the idea that rights
are preserved from the state of nature in the civil state. ‘Men
cannot enjoy the rights of an uncivil and of a civil state
together…That he may secure some liberty, he makes a surrender
in trust of the whole of it’ (CW VIII, p. 110). And where he
claims that, in England, ‘We have not been drawn and trussed, in
order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with
chaff and rage, and paltry, blurred shred of paper about the rights of
man’ (CW VIII, p. 137). It seems more likely, however, that
Paine's distinction between natural rights, where we necessarily have
the power to execute the right (as in the right of conscience), as
against rights where we need the arm of society to secure the right
(as in property), although more sharply expressed in Rights of
Man (1791), is a product of discussions with Jefferson and French
sympathizers with America in the late 1780s, when they were discussing
the proposed Federal Constitution and its failure to contain a bill of
rights. In a letter to Jefferson written in 1788/9 Paine draws a
distinction between ‘rights they could individually exercise
fully and perfectly, and those they could not’ (CW II,
1298). In the reply to Burke this is used to show that every civil
right grows out of a natural right or ‘is a natural right
exchanged)’; that the civil power is made up of the aggregate of
that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in
the individual in point of power; and that the power produced from the
aggregate of natural rights, imperfect in power in the
individual’, cannot be applied to invade the natural rights
which are retained by the individual…’ (CW I, 276).

How much, in fact, separates Paine from Burke? The rights in which
our power is perfect, are relatively few—so that many of the
things that really matter, access to means of labour and sustenance,
freedom of movement and contract, seem to fall under Burke's sense of
matters of convenience which government orders on the basis of general
utility. Although Paine does not provide much detail, it seems clear
that he sees himself as different from Burke primarily because he
argues for continuing normative salience of the natural right and for
the on-going collective sovereignty of the people over the
arrangements that they make the better to secure those rights. Paine's
readers had little doubt that he sought to defend their rights from
invasion, but his distinction does not in-itself do that. After all,
what is to stop the collective encroaching on the rights of citizens?
One answer is given in Paine's account of popular sovereignty.

Common Sense might presume a principle of collective
self-determination and the sovereignty of the people, but it does not
articulate or defend it. Something like this issue does come under
consideration in Paine's Dissertations on Government, a
pamphlet written in 1786, defending the Bank of America and the
principle that contracts formed by government ought to be respected by
subsequent occupants of power. ‘Every government…contains
within itself a principle common to all, which is that of a sovereign
power, or a power over which there is no control, and which controls
all others….In republics, such as those established in America,
the sovereign power…remains where nature placed it—in the
people. …This sovereignty is exercised in electing and deputing
a certain number of persons to represent and to act for the whole. But
he goes on to insist that

When a people agree to form themselves into a
republic…it is understood that they mutually resolve and pledge
themselves to each other, rich and poor alike, to support this rule of
equal justice among them… (and) they renounce as detestable,
the power of exercising, at any future time any species of despotism
over each other, or of doing a thing not right in itself, because a
majority of them may have the strength of numbers sufficient to
accomplish it. (CW II, 373)

As a result,

The sovereignty in a republic is exercised to keep right
and wrong in their proper and distinct places, and never suffer the
one to usurp the place of the other. A republic, properly understood,
is a sovereignty of justice, in contradistinction to a sovereignty of
will. (CW II, 375)

This position sits uncomfortably with more direct and active
interpretations of the sovereignty of the people or any general
will. Hence Paine's claim in 1791 to be ‘a Citizen of a country
which knows no other Majesty than that of the People; no other
Government than that of the Representative body; no other sovereignty
than that of the Laws…’ (CW II, 1315).

Paine's account of sovereignty dramatically delimits collective
power to the securing of civil rights, based on natural
right. In Rights of Man (1791) he quotes Lafayette's claim
that ‘For a nation to be free it is sufficient that she wills
it’ (CW I, 322). Lafayette most likely
meant it as a call to reject despotism; but Paine's account is perhaps
more subtle, seeing it as a right of the nation to determine its
government, but also as a right that is itself delimited by the end of
liberty—that is, by the protection of individual rights and by
ensuring their more adequate security within the collective.

That this is so helps account for Paine's account of generational
sovereignty. In Rights of Man (1791) he attacks Burke's claim
that the terms of the 1688 Revolution Settlement ”bind
us,” (meaning the people of the day) “our heirs
and our posterity, to them, their heirs and
posterity, to the end of time” (CW I, 250). Paine
demurs:

There never did, there never will, there never can
exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of
men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding
and controlling posterity to the ‘end of
time’…Every generation must be as free to act for
itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which
preceded it.

This too looks like a principle that Paine worked out with
Jefferson, in 1788-9, when Jefferson first mentions it in his
correspondence, although the prior source is likely to be Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations. The principle is a powerful one—but
it is negative: no generation can be bound by those before it; and
none can bind those after. But equally, no generation is free to act
unjustly. In his Dissertations of Government (1786), Paine
had struggled with precisely this issue in wanting to claim both the
sovereign power of the people and the duty on the part of the state to
respect contracts made previously by others in their capacity of
representatives. Paine tries to reconcile the claims by arguing that a
contract is not a law but an action, and while laws can be changed,
acts are binding. He does not yet claim generational sovereignty,
although the right to change laws is clearly there. But the insistence
on a sovereignty of justice is designed to ensure that actions that
involve the transfer of rights must have the protection of the state
and cannot be justly abrogated.

What becomes clear, is that, as Paine struggles to articulate his
account of rights, he comes to defend a very Lockean account in which
the government is there to interpret and to secure antecedently
defined rights and just claims that are the outcome of the exercise of
these rights. Rights acquired through clear contract or agreement
deserve every protection: even if subsequent generations are at
liberty to question the laws of the nation and to alter them as they
will, they are not at liberty to invade the property rights of people
secured through past agreements.

Paine's institutional suggestions in Common Sense are
hardly fully fledged proposals. Indeed, one of the most surprising
aspects of Paine's writing is how little institutional discussion
there is—he is not a man for the detailed discussions of
constitutions and legislative and executive arrangements. Even his
piece in the summer of 1791 Answer to Four Questions on the
Legislative and Executive Power is not especially
illuminating. Most modern commentators tend not to notice this. Paine
is clearly a democrat, he advocates democratic institutions, and he
rejects those of monarchy and aristocracy. But such judgments are
often deeply anachronistic. If we examine what Paine actually says, we
see that his own perspective was one which evolved and remained
inclusive in many areas. It seems clear that Paine was a
republican—but in a changing and always very specific
sense. In Dissertations on Government (1786) he specifies it
as government directed towards ‘the public good, or the good of
the whole’ (II, 372). In Rights of Man (1791) he
understands it as government by election and representation (I,
338)—a definition of republic that matches closely that
advocated by Madison in the Federalist Papers. In Rights
of Man (1792) he switches back to the earlier formulation:

What is called a republic is not
any particular form of government. It is wholly
characteristical of the purport, matter, or object for which
government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed,
res-publica, the public affairs, or the public good….Republican
government is no other than government established and conducted for
the interest of the public, as well individually as collectively. (CW
I, 369-70)

Yet he steadfastly refuses to call the form of government he is
interested in a ‘democracy’—which he identifies with
ancient direct democracy and sees as essentially limited. The system
he sees as operating in America is ‘representation ingrafted
upon democracy’ (CW I, 371). And, unlike Joel Barlow, he does
not use the neologism ‘representative democracy’ nor, like
John Adams, ‘representative government.’ Paine thus plays
a part in the process of transforming representation from something
that was seen as compatible with monarchical—indeed with
absolutist—states, although it could also take more popular
forms, often linked to a gothic feudal past—into something that
was directly linked to the sovereignty of the people in their
nations. But, in many respects, he does little especially
innovative. The one major impact of his work was to bring to a wide
audience some of the thinking that he shared with both Madison and
Jefferson about the distinctive features of the American form of
government.

Rights of Man (1791) is a rather mixed performance,
combining historical narrative of events in France, engagement with
Burke, the adumbration of principles, and some powerful moments of
political rhetoric—suggesting that Burke has constructed a set
of tragic paintings by which he has ‘outraged his own
imagination’ (CW I, 258), that Burke ‘pities the plumage
but forgets the dying bird’ (CW I, 260) and that he has worked
‘up a tale accommodated to his own passions and
prejudices.’ He makes his points about rights polemically, as he
does those concerning the sovereignty of each generation and in
drawing a distinction between the constitution and the government, and
his most passionate attacks are on the hereditary principle and its
accompanying ‘gibberish’ of titles and
distinctions—‘the idea of hereditary legislators is as
inconsistent as that of hereditary judges , or hereditary juries; and
as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man;
and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate’ (CW I,
289).

In Rights of Man (1792) Paine shifts the ground
substantially. He hardly mentions events in France, and barely touches
on Burke. Instead, the revolution in America is announced as an event
of global importance—the place ‘where the principles of
universal reformation could begin’ (CW I, 354). What began in
America is now seen, not as an exception, but as the trigger for a
renovation or the world as a whole. The relative tolerance for
France's monarchy in the first part of Rights of Man is set
aside, suggesting that Paine had not previously thought that the old
world states could manage a representative system of the American
form, but that he now does think this. Moreover, his old distinction
between society and government is re-animated but, instead of
emphasizing the inevitability of vice, he represents society as in
almost every respect sufficient unto itself: ‘Government is no
further necessary than to supply the few cases to which society and
civilisation (a new concept) are not conveniently competent’ (CW
I, 357-8). Indeed, ‘the more perfect civilisation is, the less
occasion has it for government, because the more does it regulate its
own affairs, and govern itself…’ (CW I, 358-9). And,
again, it is America that is the model—where the country
subsisted with hardly any form of government throughout the revolution
and the subsequent period. Moreover, America becomes the model for
reform: a society that agrees articles, establishes a constitution,
and is able periodically to revise the constitution as the collective
act of the people. Contrasting old forms of government, based on an
assumption of power, for the aggrandizement of itself’; and the
new: ‘a delegation of power, for the common benefit of the
people’ (CW I, 363), Paine roots the new forms in the
establishment of a constitution and the regulation of government in
accordance with the constitution for the good of all, seeing the
American example as one that may be spread throughout the
globe. Indeed, Paine thinks ‘it is too soon to determine to what
extent of improvement government may yet be carried. For what we can
foresee, Europe may form but one great republic, and man be free of
the whole’ (CW I, 397). This is a hymn to representative
government, to minimal government, and to government with the primary
concern of protecting the natural rights of man more effectively. It
is not a defense of democracy or universal suffrage. For all his
characterization as a democrat he does not embrace that description;
and there is no advocacy of universal suffrage prior to
Paine's Letter Addressed to the Addressers, written and
published in the summer of 1792 shortly before he left for
France. This should further alert us to the fact that, in this period,
Paine's thinking was changing, often as rapidly as events around him
changed.

In the final chapter of Rights of Man, Paine addresses the
expenditure of the British state and to issues of commerce. Since
his Letter to the Abbe Raynal (1782), he had expressed a
growing confidence in commerce as a means of uniting the interests of
nations and rendering outdated and irrelevant the European system of
war. The final chapter of Rights of Man develops the same
view, suggesting the incompatibility between monarchical regimes and
the growth of commerce and national wealth, and going on to itemize
the taxation raised in Britain to support the costs of monarchical
wars. Given the new era of peace between nations consequent upon the
revolutions in America and France, Paine raises the question of what
should be done about the immense sums raised in taxes in Britain (some
£15.5 millions), suggesting that ‘whoever has observed the
manner in which trade and taxes twist themselves together, must be
sensible of the impossibility of separating them suddenly’ (CW
I, 423). Paine then develops a series of welfare proposals that seem
to have no underlying principle of justice, but are proffered wholly
as a way of redirecting spending. He advocates that poor relief be
removed as a local tax and replaced by central provision from
government coffers; that pensions be offered for those advanced in
age, starting at 50, and in full form at 60; that provision be made
for the education of the poor; that maternity be benefit be granted to
all women immediately after the birth of a child; that a fund be
established for the burial of those who die away from home; and that
arrangements be made for the many young people who travel to the
metropolis in search of a livelihood to provide initial accommodation
and support until they find work. Paine ends by identifying provision
for those who have served in the army and navy, and suggesting that,
as demands on the public purse from these sources declines, then items
of indirect taxation might also be lifted, and the burden of taxation
gradually shifted towards a progressive taxation on landed property,
coupled with the abolition of primogeniture, and a progressive tax on
the income from investments. Although certainly influenced by his
acquaintance with Condorcet and members of the Comité de
Menicité de la Constituante, this raft of proposals
represents a major innovation on Paine's part, its slight oddity being
the absence of any clear set of underlying principles for its
justification.

The ad hoc turn to welfare in the second part
of Rights of Man (1792) finds some compensation in the short
pamphlet, Agrarian Justice (1795-6), that Paine wrote after
his release from prison in response to the unrest in 1795 in Paris as
protests spread against the economic hardship suffered in the capital,
stimulating culminating in Babeuf's conspiracy of equals. Unlike the
final chapter of Rights of Man, Agrarian Justice provides a
principled defense for welfare provision, rooted in a conception of
the original equality of man and the equal right to a subsistence from
the earth. He acknowledges that there are benefits to allowing private
property in land and its cultivation, but argues that every proprietor
owes the community a ground-rent for the land he holds, which should
be used as a right of inheritance for all, paying the sum of £15
as a compensation for the loss of natural inheritance at the age of
twenty-one and an annual grant to the aged. These payments are a
matter of right, not of charity. A claim against the common stock that
all may make, on the ground that ‘no person ought to be in a
worse condition when born under what is called a state of
civilization, than he would have been had he been born in a state of
nature…’ (I, 613). The money is to be raised from
progressive taxation in inherited wealth and will contribute to its
more equal distribution.

To modern critics it may seem odd to couple the essentially
libertarian sentiments of the opening of the second part of Rights
of Man with a major raft of welfare reforms. But Paine clearly
did not think about these reforms as an extension
of government. Although he does not make the point, they seem
to be more a matter of administration, and that is in keeping with his
essentially consensual view of the formal exercise of responsibilities
by those invested with the confidence of the nation as a whole.

Paine's proposals probably had little practical effect on the
emergence of the welfare state, but they helped influence early
socialist doctrines and working men's associations, and they have
since been taken up by those advocating a right to basic income or a
child inheritance as a way of ensuring that the young need not inherit
their parents’ poverty.

In his Letter Addressed to the Addressers (1792), and more
fully in Dissertation on First Principles of Government 1795)
Paine commits to the conclusion that equal rights entail an equal
right to have a say in one's representative. He provides two main
arguments. In the Letter… he argues that as every man
over the age of twenty-one pays taxes in one form of another, so
everyone has a right to vote—or a form of entitlement through
contribution. But in the Dissertation he makes the case
wholly on the basis of equal natural rights: ‘the right of
voting for representatives is the primary right by which other rights
are protected. To take away this right is to reduce a man to slavery,
for slavery consists in being subject to the will of another, and he
that has not a vote in the election of representatives is in this
case. (II, 579) ‘It is possible to exclude men from the right of
voting, but it impossible to exclude them from the right of rebelling
against that exclusion; and when other rights are taken away, the
right of rebellion is made perfect.’ (II, 580) This suggests
that the role of rights grows in importance for Paine, making little
appearance at all before 1788, and then coming to play an expanding
role in his account, to provide the underpinning for political
authority and an account of its limits, to justify the right to vote,
and to make the case for a right to land and the fruits of nature
which is translated into an inheritance right and a range of welfare
rights. In his account of the origin of rights in Rights of
Man (1791), he suggests that those (like Burke) who appeal to the
authority of antiquity simply do not go back far enough:

If antiquity is to be an authority, a thousand such
authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other;
but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come
to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker…we have
now arrived at the origin of man, and at the origin of his
rights…It is authority against authority all the way, until we
come to the divine origin of the rights of man, at the Creation. Here
or inquiries find a resting-place, and out reason finds a home. (I,
273)

For a man so frequently called an atheist, Paine shows a remarkable
confidence in the divine order of the creation. The work that did most
to damage his reputation in America, and which split his supporters in
Britain, was his Age of Reason (1793/4), which was followed
by a further part in 1795, and additional writings compiled by later
editors into a third part, from 1804. The Age of Reason is
not an atheist tract, but a deist one. It combines scathing criticism
of claims to authority for the bible by religious authorities, with an
expression of confidence in a divinely ordered world, revealed in
nature through the exercise of reason, that drew heavily on the
lectures he had attended in London prior to leaving for America, given
by James Ferguson and Benjamin Martin. Indeed, he seemed to have
committed their account to memory, and uses the text to lay out the
order of the universe, to speculate on the possibility of a plurality
of worlds, and to dismiss all claims for mystery, miracles and
prophecy. God is an unmoved first cause, who designs and sets the
universe in motion for the benefit of man, and the moral duty of man
consists in ‘imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of
God, manifested in the creation toward all His
creatures…everything of persecution and revenge between man and
man, and everything off cruelty to animals, is a violation of moral
duty.’ (I, 512). Although the later parts of Age of Reason
descend into detailed interpretation and controversy, and lose
much of their intuitive appeal, the first part is a powerful
confession of rationalist faith in a divine creator whose design can
be appreciated by man in the Bible of Creation, whose principles are
eternal, and which rejects as meaningless the claims to authority and
the theology of the Christian Churches. ‘The study of theology,
as it stands in the Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is
founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it produces no
authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits
of no conclusion’ (CW I, 601). ‘The only religion that has
not been invented, and that has in it every evidence of divine
originality, is pure and simple Deism’ (CW I, 600). And as
simple government avoids us becoming the dupes of fraud, so simple
belief protects us from the fraud of priestcraft, which so often runs
hand in hand with despotism.

Paine's religious views, not unlike his political views, are not
especially original or subtle. They follow much of the deist writing
of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But, as with
much Paine wrote, the bluntness and sweeping rhetoric that alienates
the more philosophically inclined modern reader were an essential
element in his success and his continuing importance. Paine spoke to
ordinary people—and they read him in their
thousands—indeed, he was often read aloud in public houses and
coffee shops. He claimed no authority over them, but helped them to
doubt those who did claim such authority, whether civil or religious,
and he affirmed over and over again their right and responsibility to
think for themselves and to reach their own judgment on matters. He
did so at a time when the press had become capable of reaching even
the poorest of society—when the Attorney General launched the
prosecution of Rights of Man (1792) he distinguished between
the first part, which was ‘ushered into the world under
circumstances that led me to conceive that it would be confined to the
judicious reader’, and the second part, which ‘with an
industry incredible, it was either totally or partially thrust into
the hands of all persons in this country, of subjects of every
description…Gentlemen, to whom are those positions, that are
contained in this book addressed…to the ignorant, to the
credulous, to the desperate.’ (State Trails v. 22, 381-3).

Paine would have embraced the description—although he was
less of a ‘common man’ than many who have subsequently
eulogized him make him out to be. In many respects, he was a
moderately respectable radical, with a deep suspicion of the
hierarchical systems of Europe, a brimming confidence in his own
judgment that his experience in America confirmed - which expressed
itself in his willingness to tackle a range of subject areas,
including bridge-building and scientific experiments—and with a
growing sense that he knew how to communicate, with powerful effect,
with a popular audience at exactly the point at which that popular
audience was beginning to feel and test its political influence.

Paine was vehemently attacked in his own lifetime—if the
scurrilous biography was not invented for him it certainly attained
something of an art form in his depiction. He was outlawed in England,
nearly lost his life in France, and was largely ostracized and
excluded when he returned to America. A sizable collection of papers
at his New Rochelle farm were destroyed in a fire, and his oeuvre
remains contested, at least at the margins. Biographers have drawn
heavily on early work by Moncure Conway, but while several new accounts
appear each decade few add much to our knowledge. Serious analysis of
his ideas is relatively rare, and tends to be more historically than
philosophically orientated. In this sense, he remains on the edges of
the cannon of political thought, easily dismissed by those who want
more substantial philosophical fare, and subject to fits of enthusiasm
by writers who are either insufficiently attuned to the complexities
of the period or are simply uncritical. Such an attitude does poor
service to the history, to the ideas, or to the man.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, in
L. G. Mitchell (ed.), The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke:
Vol VIII The French Revolution 1790-1794, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1989.

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